1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method for remedial reading instruction and to an aid for implementing the instruction method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Contemporary reading instruction methods are focused on the attentive skills of the primary student. Teaching the adolescent or young adult who is classified as having a language learning disability requires considerably more skill and finesse. Although contemporary methods vary, most reading instruction techniques emphasize the following cognitive skills: (a) recognition of letters of the alphabet in cursive and manuscript in both upper and lower case; (b) word recognition; (c) word comprehension; and (d) reading compreshension.
The object of learning programs for language learning disabled students is reading comprehension. Reading comprehension cannot be mastered until the student has acquired word comprehension. Word comprehension, in turn, depends upon word recognition. Finally, word recognition depends upon recognition of the letters of the alphabet and syllabic combinations of letters. Thus, contemporary reading instruction programs involve a continuous chain of the foregoing congnitive skills which are initially learned one step at a time, with various combinations of the cognitive skill acquisition steps occurring simultaneously as the learning process accelerates with the student's age and maturity.
Typically, language learning disabled students are able to memorize and recognize letters of the alphabet, to identify vowels and consonants, and are able to memorize and recognize simple one syllable words. However, language is made up of thousands of words, and in the English language these words are formed most often of two, three and syllable combinations of letters. It is obvious then that language learning disabled students fail to acquire reading comprehension of text because text is composed of unfamiliar words having multiple syllable combinations of letters. Thus, the stumbling point for the language learing disabled student appears to occur between the stage of recognition of letters of the alphabet, and the stage of recognition of multiple syllable words.
Various techniques have been practiced for bridging the gap between the first stage of letter recognition and the second stage of word recognition. One such technique employs flash cards with the word inscribed on one side of the card and an illustration of the meaning of the word on the reverse side of the card. Another technique is the rote memory method of repetitive writing exercises. Additionally, certain programmed materials have been used in which the student is instructed to establish a correspondence between a multiple syllable word and the object or idea which it represents. This is an associative matching exercise in which a group of words are arranged in a column and a group of pictures are arranged in an opposite column, and the student is instructed to draw a line between the word and the picture which corresponds in meaning with the word.
Such word recognition methods have been used to good advantage by those students having average or better learning ability; however, the rate of growth of vocabulary and ability to comprehend is limited by the frequency of occurrence of previously memorized words in the reading text and by the student's ability to recall and recognize those same words without reference to pictoral representations of the words. A profound limitation is, of course, that the words of the English language are made up of many thousands of permutations and combinations of the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. Thus, the reading development of the primary student who possesses only an average or below average learning ability and who relies substantially upon conventional rote memory or associative techniques is severely limited, and that student may eventually be classified as language learning disabled.